The immediate reaction most people have is that social media, texting etc. must have a negative impact on spelling. If we consider all the abbreviations or acronyms that the quick, fast and technology driven society is using, we could not imagine otherwise. It all started with the SMS system at first only allowing 160 characters per message. It forced people to omit letters, words and punctuation to be able to fit everything they wanted to say into the 160 characters.
Research has proved the contrary though. Nenagh Kemp found that as long as a child is able to differentiate between the formal writing and texting languages, it actually just adds a unique, casual writing style to the child’s repertoire.
She also found that the common errors accepted in texting were also common errors made by younger children in general (e.g. punctuation, omission of words and omission of capital letters). College students displayed far less errors in formal writing. This could be due to the fact that they are more exposed to formal written texts and have learned the correct way to use punctuations and capital letters. It could also imply that college students are better equipped to transition back and forth from formal writing and texting.
Another study pointed out the positive as well as negative impact that texting has on skills of school aged children. They found that negative impacts include the effect on grammar and punctuation, writing too fast and using text language (omitting words). Positives include lessons learned about sharing of information and ideas, encouragement of creativity and the expression of thoughts.
Message writing seems to be shaped by what children and their friends think messaging should look like, auto-correct on the cellphones and a desire to include expression of emotion in text messages. It is encouraging to realise that the texting language does not only have a negative impact on people.
You might want to read more about whether the correct spelling is important.
